


Winter: 1399

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:07:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by Academe</p><p>It is the last winter of the century, and King Henry is having bad dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter: 1399

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my beta, and I do hope my recipient enjoys this!
> 
> Written for the_red_shoes

 

 

Winter, 1399. Another dreadful day near the start of the new reign; the king in a filthy temper, hot-faced and embarrassed, the government a mass of men who don't know how to rule this miry realm. The king cannot sleep, mustn't sleep. Everyone seems to have been walking for days, then London; an entrance Henry cannot forget, still smelling the stench of detritus not heaped on him. He is as haunted by that day as his uncle, that good man, who watched white-faced beside his sulking son. Both York and Henry remember Richard, so present in his absence that even the foul storm of royal distemper cannot whip away the image of Richard in his prisoner's smock. Richard, his simple garments billowing like a white sail, like a shroud, offering Henry Bolingbroke a golden crown. 

With an edge of kindness to his voice.

With less strength and more charisma than Henry can ever hope to possess. Richard is blood of Henry's bone and flesh of his flesh; God's anointed on Earth. God reached out and touched Richard, and made him a boyhood King in minority. _I am too young to be your father_ , Richard said once, and now Henry is ready to answer Richard's words: _you are part of myself._ Richard is Henry's cousin and even if they are, as he fears, a lost generation, the blood-drenched children of immortals, Henry will love him. He cannot lose Richard as easily as Adam lost his rib. He is afraid to sleep and wake knowing his cousin is dead.

Henry is pursuing his son and pursued by his cousins. He is King, his uncle declared him King: already, Henry feels that he is circling his own death. 

At night, it seems that death is reaching out to touch him.

(His heir is nowhere. God's anointed still lives. God never touched Henry Bolingbroke: of that, Henry the Fourth is certain. )

So Henry circles his castle, Richard's castle, sleeping sleepless in Richard's bed, with every measure temporary and every decision desperate. The barons war, as do their sons. Every day, Henry resigns himself to loving one Hal and hating another; fearing, always, to find Richard in either man's eyes (Henry remembers how his uncles plagued Richard with talk of resemblance). Hal, his son, his princely changeling, is debauching himself amongst commoners in Eastcheap. Involuntarily, every time he thinks of this, Henry -head heavy beneath the weight of this crown, heavier than any armour he ever wore -remembers Richard amongst his favourites. When Henry dreams of them, it is to wake shuddering and spent.

Hal's tastes are for dirt, ale, and cheap women with breasts squashed against dirty whalebone. His thoughts are bloody, grasping, infantile. He seeks whatever is impossible for a prince to experienceÐ a term Richard never understood. Richard could never remember the desires of his childhood, the wishes he had before he had the crown. Richard of Bordeaux never knew a whim that could not be gratified. Against the mandatory backdrop of silk and gold and natural-as-breathing desire. 

Richard was created to be a prince; to be beautiful against white pillows, to laugh over his books and make elegant dalliance with the play of ideas. Henry remembers his cousin's young men -young men whom he has killed, or whom his followers (and that is the word; they are in pursuit of Henry, he is their debtor -he cannot repay credit bought with blood) have murdered. He remembers the nights in the castle, Bushy, Bagot and Green making three heads at the corners of Richard's state bed; dun, fawn and ash-blond heads against the brilliant red-gold. He remembers the dinners that began too late; the drinking parties at which he should never have been, and then, much later, the moonless nights of sin. Memories he tells himself he saw only through keyholes; stories that came as the whispers of rumour, and not by listening at locked doors. He knows he slept in Richard's bed but once after they were young men; as always, he lies to himself about that details.

He remembers finding his youthful tongue mute at a public banquet, because Richard's long hands were crushing grapes, plucked in their dozens from a twisting stem. He remembers the rush of passionate pride he felt one winter's day before a glass, when Richard (then very young) used his clever tongue for persuading him to twist this way and that, and lay one Plantagenet head against another, gold against gold. Richard held him by the shoulders and said see and murmured indistinguishable, and Henry was reminded suddenly of the chronicles, of chalices, of his father's sword and the winter's scythe. Everything in which he saw himself, everything which had taught him to love and fear. It was too easy to say that Richard was beautiful (as the young men did); too trite to say that he burned like a flame. Too simple to call him a god, because gods did not fall off their horses, or outgrow their boots, or taste like foul sweat and water in the morning. But sometimes, men called Richard Phoebus, and Henry believed in that. Bright enough to wake you. Bright enough to burn you - a creature of fire and air and dazzle, a myth amongst men. Now cold and shivering in a Pontefract winter. 

And so Henry circles the castle, a poor moon, swollen and angry, swallowed by agues in the London air. He cannot find his son, and still Aumerle dogs his steps with sullen eyes and yellowing hair, the small pale sketch of Richard that scours Henry's heart. Hotspur is always moving, always ahead of his father; the golden pride and light of every statesman's eye, drawing time into his hands. Hotspur will have glory; will find it, even in his own annihilation. There is work to be done, there is always work, whether in devotion or destruction or the saving of London's heir from himself. Wherever he turns, the king lacks a place to lay his head. And meanwhile Richard dies in Pontefract, a little more each day, and his existence is a misery to both Kings, to each a living shame. Henry can feel the life drop from Richard as if it were his own blood shed two hundred miles away; he listens for Richard's breathing in the dark, though he cannot hope to hear it. He thinks of Richard's fading light as if through his cousin's own (poetic) thoughts (in approximation), with metaphors about falling flowers and animals killed in the chase. It is the last winter of the century. It is fourteen hundred years since the Christmas that saw Christ born in a stable-bed. Henry knows that his cousin cannot see the spring. He dreams at night of Richard, and wakes to the taste of Richard's blood on his lips. He sees his cousin when he kneels before the sacrament. He dreams of Richard so intensely that he has begun to believe in the madness physicians and rumour-mongers attribute to the Richard unseen. 

Henry chases a power he cannot hold and a dignity of divinity that he cannot hope to possess, even though God's anointed is deposed, discredited, dying in a winter cell. He fears future unpopularity less than the present dread in his uncle's eyes. He fears the severance of the inky cord which binds Richard's heart, unseen, against his own. The cord will snap, and soon. Henry fears God's intervention, still, even though his own eyes have seen the sinner's body spread against a bed where kings have lived and died, the flaxen hair of three young men falling forwards as their heads bent to kiss and pleasure a king. 

Henry remembers the circles of their childhood; the time spent running, hunting, watching as Richard loudly explained elaborate designs traced in the sand. Richard's smile in the looking-glass, Richard's exhausted tears -a family legend - at his coronation. Richard's body, lean and full of heat behind the chapel curtain; Richard's mouth, red and sweet with wine. Richard's gifts to Henry's children, none of whom bore his name. His fingers on the christening cradle; his long eyes slanting down. And Henry's guilt, even then; the guilt of a subject who has outrun his King.

He remembers, too, the once-new smell of furs and blankets, and a golden body that arched to meet his own. Strength, and laughter, and then the dark, sweet bliss of sleep. Richard's hand on the pillow. Richard's mouth against his hair.

He cannot sleep. When he closes his eyes, Henry smells flame.

Another dreadful day at the start of the new reign. The king in a temper, hot-faced and embarrassed; the winter sickness killing the castle from the livestock up. Richard, deposed king, kneels in Pontefract and prays, bowed head the colour which - unlike Henry's - never darkened. Richard's queen is dying. He dreams now, falling forward from tiredness and cold, grateful for the kiss of matted straw and stone against his cheek. He dreams of Westminster Hall, of his cousins, of Henry's hands that never stilled for him. In London, Bolingbroke's mind is full of serpents; in Pontefract, Richard is merely bitten by cold, and hunger, and defeat. Henry's advisers whisper that much life before death will make Richard a saint. 

Henry, waking hard and hungry in the night, knows Richard is something worse. 

 


End file.
